Production Paths: Finding Your Own Way

I believe that the production process is more important to the quality of the reproduction of a piece of music than anything else in the world of music recording and playback. This includes the final delivery format and ALL of the fancy equipment that is used to reproduce the recorded music.

What do I mean by the production process? It’s the part of the recording process when there are musicians/singers in front of microphones and a recording machine. It’s the postproduction editing and mixing stage of a project. And it’s the final mastering, encoding and format decisions that lock the sound down for final distribution. As you can imagine, there are lots of different approaches to the production process. Today and in several additional posts, I’d like to explore some of these methods and examine the approaches by some of the audiophile labels and their engineers.

Historically, recordings were done with all of the performers sitting in front of a recording apparatus. The quiet instruments sat closer to the horn (microphone?) and the louder ones were father away. There were no electronics involved…just an acoustic horn used to concentrate the sounds produced by the musicians and deliver them to a mechanism that cut lateral (side to side) grooves in a wax blank. The fidelity was limited but tolerable and the music industry was born.

The continuing development of equipment and most importantly the introduction of electrical amplification and manipulation continued through the middle decades of the 20th century. However, the core concept of this production methodology remains with us all these years later. That concept is the idea of recording everyone at the same time…without “overdubs” of any kind. Engineers began to experiment with more microphone feeds so that the natural balance of the ensemble could be manipulated during the sessions. The mixed output was then cut in mono on lacquer masters, which were then electroplated and mass-produced as 78s or even vinyl LPs.

This particular method of making records was driven by the limitations of the technology of the time (there were no multichannel recording devices AND no ability to add new musical part on top of an existing track) and a philosophical belief that the best musical performances happen when everyone is playing together. The decision whether to capture a “real-time” performance or assemble a song one part at a time is still with us.

When I started AIX Records in 2000, I knew that I wanted to have everyone playing and singing at the same time in spite of the fact that I had the latest high definition multichannel recording equipment and a great studio at my disposal. The “mojo” that happens when musicians get together and play as an ensemble is enhanced when they can see and hear each other. If the drummer and bass player never “lock” together because they played to a click track (an electrical metronome that is sent to a set of headphones as the tempo reference), the ultimate performance is diminished. Sadly, this is how most commercial recordings are produced.

That’s not to say that making records with everyone present is the only and most valid way to create a recording. It does work exceedingly well for jazz and classical projects but not so much for new commercial pop and rock projects. This is especially true if the artist, producer and engineer are figuring out the “best” possible arrangement, tempo, style, groove, key and sound as they craft the tune. The pop/rock recordings that I have done on AIX Records depend on the artist already having established those attributes before coming to record them. But a lot of “hits” are written, arranged and edited during the recording process.

I made the decision to record entire albums during a single session. Others may take months or even years to build an album’s worth of tunes. The listening experience between these approaches will be dramatically different…but both are completely valid. Once again, it comes down to personal taste.

We’ve only just touched on production paths…more to come.